


iris (hold me close)

by owlsareheadturners



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: F/M, Fluff, kanda is sure as hell not going to explain flowers, no; he's not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 05:39:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18543397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlsareheadturners/pseuds/owlsareheadturners
Summary: A story about friendship, because Kanda is sure as hell not going to explainflowers.





	iris (hold me close)

**Author's Note:**

> For my friend Maru, featuring her OC, Jun. This was actually written years ago but I stumbled upon it again recently, and thought I'd share.

“Say, Kanda, something’s come to my attention recently.”

“And what would that be, you insufferable beansprout?”

It’s rained right before breakfast, and the downpour shows no signs of stopping. Allen likes the rain; it always rains in England, and if nobody keeps a tight watch over him he’ll find every chance he can get to run out and get himself soaked. Lenalee’s always telling him he shouldn’t, that he’ll catch his death this way, but he’s never listened.

Kanda think’s he’s like a dog, which logically means that he should be kicked like a dog at every chance Kanda’s got. Unfortunately, Allen disagrees, and that’s often the trigger for many fights that have wrecked one part of the Order’s Headquarters or another.

Allen replies. “Well, you see, I was looking for a good place to practice gate-opening, and then I just happened upon this room right in the corner of North Tower, but I think someone was already using it.”

“Someone…? Using it? Don’t be an idiot, no one ever goes up there.” It’s true, unless the person in question was a fan of serious dust allergies. Kanda digs his chopsticks into his soba, and Allen rolls his eyes. “Seriously, who eats soba in the morning? It’s not even a proper breakfast food.”

“I’ll have you know that Japanese people eat soba all the time in the morning,” Kanda retorts hotly, snapping at a tempura as if he would have liked to do the same to Allen’s neck. “Anyway, I don’t figure the kind of crap _you’re_ eating is supposed to be healthy for you, either.” He eyes Allen’s full English breakfast(s) warily. Allen flashes him a grin as bright as a camera’s flash bulb, and takes another impossibly large bite, which Kanda just stares at.

“But I’m telling you, I saw someone up there. Well, I heard them, anyway. There’s a piano in that room, and someone was playing it, I think. And singing, I might add.” Allen’s eyes grow to the size of dinner plates as he babbles on, breakfast all but forgotten. “I mean, I sing, too, but this voice was one of the nicest I’ve heard. Timcanpy can testify for me, can’t you, Tim?”

The golden golem merely hovers around Allen’s plate, and snaps up another stack of bacon.

“Hey, I was going to eat that!”

 _All of it?_ Kanda won’t ever understand Allen Walker’s inhuman appetite.

All the same, he decides to check it out. It won’t hurt, and from all the clues that Allen has given him, he has a steadily growing hunch that sinks in his stomach like a stone.

 _Could it be…?_  


* * *

 

 

It’s not until the end of his afternoon sparring practice with Lenalee does Kanda remember to check the room at the top of North Tower. He’s almost half-talked himself out of it; it’s not like the person will have been there for what amounts to half the entire day, just _playing_ or _singing_ , but it’s worth a try, and the climb up the stairs will serve as a convenient, if dusty, cooling-down exercise.

He’s barely breathing faster, though he’s taken the sharply winding set of stairs three at a time, and soon the wooden door with its brass knuckle comes into view, looming out of the darkness. He stops on the landing, waits for something—anything—in the still silence. Then he hears it.

“A long road to heaven’s shining meadow, and never could I reach its end… ”

Heart thumping hard, he pushes open the door, and is greeted by a burst of light which strikes him full in the face, blinding him momentarily.

“…But a longer road leads to your heart—”

The piano stops before his eyes can adjust to the sudden brightness, and he almost falls back over and down the stairs as something flies into his arms, more than a good head shorter than him. Arms wrap tight around his ribcage, nearly choking all the breath out of him.

“Yuu!”

 

 

**i.**

Tiedoll had wanted to attend Sunday service in _China_ , of all places. Kanda had _not_ wanted to sit on his ass for more than an hour while some fat Chinese priest droned on like a self-important printing press at the front of a large hall. There could be _Akuma_ out there, for God’s sake, and while he was sitting there bored out of his mind people could be dying. Dying.

Did Tiedoll not give a rat’s ass about that?

Tiedoll had taken one look at Kanda’s stormcloud expression, and then another at Noise Marie’s sunlit smile, and then grabbed Kanda’s hand and dragged him into the church.

“Don’t hold my bloody hand!” Kanda had hissed, glaring daggers at Tiedoll’s bemused smile. “I’m not a fucking kid, General, let me g—”

Somehow he’d ended up on a pew, wedged tightly between Noise Marie’s hulking frame on his left, blocking the way to the aisle, and Tiedoll’s wiry body on his right… as well as the rest of the row of devout devotees.

_Well, screw it all to hell._

The only time he’d snapped out of imagining his ideal garden plot was when a melodious harmony had wafted through the hall, drifting all the way to the domed ceiling. He’d glanced up from his reverie, stunned. A sunbeam had broken through one of the stained glass windows, and the ray of colour had struck the figure that was leading the choir, bathing her in an ethereal, otherworldly light, bringing out the distinct shades in her uneven, brown hair, brown as a handful of fresh soil that he had once cupped in his hands, in his small garden back at the Asian Branch. His heart had swelled like a bud as the song reached its climax.

“Like a flowering tree, the world is blooming… ”

The world had seemed to bloom for him like a garden in that moment, just like the moment when he had burst free from his cocoon, emerging like a butterfly into the light.

 

* * *

 

“Well, come on, then. Service is over, Yuu. Or perhaps you’d like to stay for the next session—? That isn’t until 3 in the afternoon, though…” Tiedoll’s smile is infuriatingly half-hidden behind his moustache, and Kanda resists the urge to punch his General in the face. Noise Marie gets up with a low grunt, feeling along the pew for an exit into the aisle, and Kanda is mildly surprised to see a tear glistening in the corner of his eye.

“That was wonderful, wasn’t it, General?”

“Oh, you can be sure it was. Now, if only Yuu displayed an artistic talent like that… I’d surely be truly blessed by the Lord.” Tiedoll extends his arms and looks up towards the heavens, and this time Kanda does take a potshot at him, but misses—Tiedoll’s agility is that of a man decades younger.

He’s in a foul mood all the way back to the inn.

 

* * *

 

Noise Marie wakes him somewhere at 3 in the morning, the night air stale on his face. Kanda notices, with some disgust, that it’s been raining.

“What,” he grumbles, gathering his hair as best as he can, and tying it into a loose ponytail at the back of his head.

“Mission,” grunts Noise Marie, as if it wasn’t particularly obvious to Kanda anyway. Kanda sits up, swings his feet off the edge of the bed, and works out the crick in his neck—the mattresses at Tiedoll’s inn of choice aren’t exactly straight out of _The Princess and the Pea_ . Mugen is on a chair kept jealously close to his low, sagging bed, and Kanda grabs the sword, sticking it into his belt. Only then does he feel slightly more than _completely naked._

There’s almost no-one in the streets at such a late hour of the night, and surely the Akuma must be choosing this time on purpose to screw with him, Kanda thinks, as he tries to ignore the throbbing in his temple where his brief, restless sleep has definitely _not_ agreed with him. Their footsteps are wet on the cobbles, and Kanda wonders if they’ll keep walking until they’re at the ends of the earth.

“Here,” Tiedoll whispers, and stops in his tracks so suddenly that Kanda bangs into him and employs a few colourful choice words. “For God’s sake, General—”

“Hush, child. Do not take the Lord’s name in vain!” Sometimes Tiedoll’s a bit more of a Bible-thumper than absolutely necessary, and at all the wrong moments, too.

They’ve stopped in front of the church—Kanda recognises its sloping silhouette, even in the inky darkness. Well, more accurately, in front of the house that’s attached to the back of the church. Kanda’s best educated guess suggests that it’s where the clergy must live.

Tiedoll sidles right up to a window, and Kanda will be damned if his General doesn’t look bloody suspicious. He scowls, checks around to see if anyone is watching, and then dashes under the window, and peers over the ledge.

_It’s her—!_

The girl from the service. The unkempt locks couldn’t have belonged to anyone else in the world. Her back is to him, and she’s shaking like a leaf in a strong autumn wind. Then he notices why.

Her throat is pale, perhaps made even more so by the blade that burns slow and droll in the firelight, pressed against her skin. The man with the knife is saying something, and so Kanda nudges Marie hard, unease roiling in his throat.

“Stay still, unless you want to bleed out all over the floor,” Marie rumbles in translation, and then pauses a while more to listen.

“You can help, Jun. There are people from the other side, people who want to come back, and just with the power of naming you can save a soul!”

Everything sounds fucking weird in Marie’s voice, but this isn’t the time to be thinking about such things.

“General, she’s obviously terrified,” Kanda snaps. “Shouldn’t we go in and save her, before she makes herself an Akuma, or worse?”

“Wait,” Tiedoll instructs, dreamily. “What happens next may be interesting.”

Kanda has learned to doubt many things over the years, but one of them is not Froi Tiedoll’s near-impeccable intuition, and so he stills his trembling hand on Mugen, and watches, intently. Marie has stopped translating, and all Kanda can make out are the indistinct blur of lips and mouths, and then—

“Duck,” advises Tiedoll cheerily, from where he’s already crouched under the window beside Marie, fingers firmly in his ears.

Kanda has less than a second to process that, before—

BOOM.

He flies backwards, glass shards cutting into his face and arms as he brings his arms up instinctively to shield his face, still dazed by the sudden explosion. His ears are ringing, and there’s a thundering in the back of his head, and for a while he’s not sure where _up_ is.

“Wha…” he croaks as soon as he’s able to, not having the presence of mind to be thoroughly pissed off at Tiedoll yet. He’s lying on his back in the grass, and Tiedoll and Marie are already on the move, the crafty bastards. Kanda springs to his feet and follows, stalking with all the impatience of a hungry panther. He just wants all of this to be over, as soon as possible, and then he can _go back to his nice room with his nice garden in his nice Headquarters,_ and maybe take a nap. And eat soba. Though not at the same time.

 

* * *

 

 

Jun is crouching on the floor with her hands over her ears and her mouth wide open, though in the moment she’s not too sure what she has it open _for._ There’s glass everywhere, and oh, _blood_ , and the sight of it stirs up a persistent, nagging nausea.

Right. Right. Her conductor had called her in after dinner, ostensibly to discuss something about her leading part in Long Road, and then all of a sudden he’d had a knife at her throat and was going to murder her, and was maybe telling her to say a name, a name that could rouse the dead, and the only thing—the instinctual thing—to do was scream. It wasn’t the most _heroic_ thing she could have done—what she would have liked to do instead was to get the knife back up at _his_ throat, and teach him the meaning of ‘ _etiquette’_ , but given the situation, it was generally agreed that there wasn’t quite the time.

The window has shattered with the burst of sound, and bits of moonlight are all over the floor, and her conductor’s dead body is lying in the stark white strip of moon, the glass like rose petals in his coffin of light.

She opens her mouth to scream again, but a heavy hand, rough and calloused and smelling oddly of paint, clamps over her mouth. “Shh,” a voice whispers in her ear. “We’re not here to harm you, so calm down.”

That’s when the man with the nasty big sword bursts through the front door, and everything goes to shit.

 

* * *

 

Once they’ve established that no matter how threatening they may look, none of the three are actually trying to kill her, Jun relents, her heart slowing again.

“So you say I have this… Innocence—am I right?” It sounds weird, coming out of her mouth like that.

“Yes,” the one with the sword snaps. He’s tall, much taller than her, and his hair is an ebony waterfall that flows over his shoulders, barely restrained by the tie keeping it at the back of his head. She has the sudden urge to know what it would look like in a dark, smooth plait. If memory hasn’t failed her, he’s Kanda; the one with the rings on his fingers is Marie, and the older man with the untameable hair is the one in command, General Tiedoll.

“And you say that if I stay here, more people could die?”

Tiedoll inclines his head. “Regrettably, my child.” Kanda scowls at that, for some reason. “It’s therefore in your best interests that you follow us back to the Headquarters, and perhaps we can find some way to settle you in there.”

Well, what other choice did she have? She’s just murdered a man—no, demolished an Akuma—in cold blood, and she can’t stay here.

“I—I’ll come along. Please take care of me!”

When the girl’s back is turned Tiedoll flashes Kanda one of the most smug grins Kanda has ever seen.

The stone wall is a satisfying substitute for his General’s face.

 

 

 

**ii.**

“Show me… how to sing,” Kanda says, trying his utmost best not to sound overly desperate. Jun’s face is framed by sunlight, and the piano studio is large and light, a construction of air. Fo watches from a nearby bench in a corner, chin resting on her palms. She and Jun have become fast friends, and they’re practically shadows of each other now.

 _Girls_ , Kanda thinks with a mental shake of the head.

“What do I sing?” Jun asks, tilting her head to one side. The light makes feathers from her hair, and it leaves Kanda distracted for a moment.

“I don’t know. Something. Anything.” He gropes for an idea. “That—that song. The one you were singing in the church.”

She frowns for a moment; then her face clears with comprehension.

“Ah!”

She sits at the piano, and places her fingers on the keys. Kanda notes that they are long, slender fingers, the nails rounded plates that glimmer in the light. Fo’s face breaks into a smile as Jun plays the opening chords, and then Jun takes a deep breath.

“I love, I love you night and day as a star in the distant sky…”

He’s floating, nebulous and unaware, a half-formed thought in embryo, and her voice beckons him towards the light.

 

* * *

 

“Did you like it?” she’s asking him, and it takes him a while to wake from this waking dream, this slow, waltzing reverie.

“I…” He can’t find words that convey the stirring in his heart enough.

“Course he does,” Fo breaks in, her voice like chimes. “Didn’t you see? He looked like he was eating tempura soba, and that’s high praise coming from him!”

Mugen misses by a mile. Kanda clicks his tongue, and exits in a huff.

 

 

 

**iii.**

Jun looks at home with her hands in the soil, pearls of sweat trickling down her cheeks and the back of her neck, guiding a rootstock into its plot. Bak’s inquisitive face peers over a hedge, and Fo’s ability to generate extra appendages is pretty useful as a massive watering can.

“Hey, what’s this?” Bak emerges into the garden, squinting at the row of iris rhizomes they’ve just given a new home to in Kanda’s garden.

“They’re irises for friendship,” Jun explains as she looks up, because Kanda is sure as hell not going to explain _flowers_.

“Friendship…” muses Bak, pinching his chin with forefinger and thumb. “D’you think you could spare some for me later? I mean, I’d just love to make a gift of them to Le-”

“Komui!” Jun and Fo chorus, and fall about themselves laughing. Bak disappears faster than a hunted fox, horrified expression on his face, and it’s just as well, because less than five seconds later Komui emerges, seemingly out of nowhere. Kanda’s always been slightly nerved by that uncanny ability of his.

“Yes?” Komui asks, pushing his glasses up so they glint in the light.

“Oh, Bak went off that way—” Fo points— “mumbling something about Lenalee. If you go quick, you might catch him!”

“The nerve!” Komui yells, and then he’s gone, quick as he came. Kanda finds his gaze drawn to the way Jun’s eyes are wide with mirth, the way her teeth flash brightly as she laughs, and even the sound of it is melodic, bringing him to mind of church bells.

 

* * *

 

“It’s true, then, isn’t it, Yuu?” He still feels a strange buzz in his jaw whenever she calls him that.

“You didn’t see me crossing my bloody fingers when I said that, did you?” He can’t help feel that his disgruntled manner has become just for show, but it doesn’t worry him too much.

She only grins widely in response. “Oh, alright then. Y’know, I’ll kinda miss you when you’re not around. You think England will be fun?”

“Hardly,” Kanda snorts. “From what I’ve heard of it, it rains every day, and _no one there eats soba._ ” This only serves to draw an amused laugh from her; he thinks he will never tire of hearing it. “Oh,” she says, her eyes widening, “I almost forgot—here.” And she hands him an iris.

He stares at it for a couple of moments, not quite knowing what to make of it.

“Aren’t you going to take it?” she teases. “Or is my friendship really worth that little?”

“Well,” he says, and realizes he doesn’t know what to tell her next.

“I’ll plait it into your hair,” she offers, and _how can he refuse_ ? It’s such a sight that soon half the personnel at the Asian Branch have gathered, just watching him with a _fucking flower in his hair_ , but somehow he doesn’t seem to mind.

It does rain in England, every day, and he presses the iris between two pages of a book and wills for her sunshine smile.

 

* * *

 

“You… came,” he says, amazed at how the words find their way out so easily; he’s been quite the mute since he got here, and Allen provokes more annoyance than anything else. Her eyes are glittering.

“Of course I did, silly. I’m here right now, aren’t I?” He has spent days recalling that exact shade of warmth, but now he won’t have to anymore, because _she’s here._

“They approved the transfer just last week. Fo sends her love!”

He finds himself saying _oh, she does, does she,_ an amused familiarity creeping back into his heart. They descend the steps together, her shoulder fitting against the crook of his arm. He wonders how he’s supposed to explain all this to the Beansprout, who’s bound to be all over her asking questions like it’ll save his life, and Lenalee, who will no doubt be pleased to see Jun again.

As they exit the stairwell of the North Tower, and cross back into the Great Hall, Kanda looks out the vast expanse of window, and noticed that it has stopped raining, and the sun is starting to emerge from behind an oppressive wall of cloud.

In his garden, the first of the new irises will be blooming.

 

-fin-


End file.
